The Writer's Almanac

I love poetry and I start (almost) every day with The Writer's Almanac, a website/podcast provided by The Poetry Foundation.

Each daily entry includes the literary history of the day, authors birthdays, anniversaries of first printings and readings, capped off with a poem, all read by none other than Garrison Keillor , in his resonant baritone voice. It's a lovely start to each day.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Your Shrinking City

How do you save your city when it's shrinking due to economic circumstances? Listen up Detroit because you can take a lesson from what's going on in East Germany right now.

By re-purposing abandoned buildings and suggesting that "city islands" be created with urban green zones and huge outdoor art projects, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) focuses on how a shrinking city can be transformed.

This photo essay and article in Speigel Online suggests how your city can withstand the departure of it's population and the economic collapse that follows and still thrive.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Civilization #7

DON'T WASTE THINGS!

This important perspective is one that people overlook again and again. In fact, many think that it's the mark of an advanced and prosperous culture; "Got so much we can throw it away!"

In How To Achieve Zero Waste At Home Ben Jervey outlines the basic rules for eliminating waste in your home.

This is actually part of #6, "Try not to run out of energy."

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

Following up on the last few days of posts, I am encouraging all to read this fine book by...wait for it...Stewart Brand.

Brand is one of the original tree huggers and one of the founders of the so-called ecology movement.  To see him come full circle to embrace nuclear energy and genetic engineering as means to avert a looming global crisis is not only satisfying, but also breathtaking.  In a time when wisdom is often measured by one's ability to ignore facts and stick steadfastly to one's failed ideas and ideology, to see someone of Brand's stature change course to achieve his lifelong goals is encouraging.  If only the rest of us would examine our ideas and challenge our sacred cows to the same ends.

Recently, no less than renowned climate scientist James Lovelock stated that humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.

He said, "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.  The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

Brand's book not only argues that we can, it spells out how.

I enjoyed reading it enormously and I hope you will read it, too.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Civilization

This was in my email today from Stewart Brand.  It summarizes David Eagleman's recent talk at the Long Now Foundation.  Here is Brand's email....

Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but runes and scattered genetics."  It takes luck and new technology to survive.  We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization:

1. "Try not to cough on one another."  More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars.  Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas.  People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague.  Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks.  All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.

2. "Don't lose things."  As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost."  Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell.  Innoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it.  These days Michaelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail.  Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Books.  "Distribute, don't revinvent."

3. "Tell each other faster."  Don't let natural disasters cascade.  The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have.  Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.

4. "Mitigate tyranny."  The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions.  Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering.  We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.

5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems."  Undertapping human capital endangers the future.  Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible.  Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart (moon exploration).  Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing."

6. "Try not to run out of energy."  When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues.  Email saves trees and trucking.  Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left.  We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.

But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down?  It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.

--SB

Thinking In Ten Dimensions

Want to think BIG thoughts?  Tired of one dimensional thinking in others (and yourself)?

Watch this........

How Buildings Learn Part Six - Shearing Layers

In the final instalment of How Buildings Learn, Brand talks about how buildings live in time and the pressures that they undergo. The layers are perpertually changing; outer shell, framework and the inner shell all exist in a relationship that runs in different time scales, so they "rub" against each other as they pass through time together.  And as Brand says, buildings that last do so because they are loved and able to be refined and their architect is time.

The Romance of Maintenance Part Two - The Reality of Decay

Some buildings that have been seriously neglected.

How Buildings Learn Part Five: The Romance of Maintenance

Things fall apart. The only thing keeping a building up is maintenance. Boring, mundane, day to day, endless tasks that keep a building from falling in on itself. In the fifth edition of How Buildings Learn, Brand talks about how to care for your home/office/sactuary.

Oh and he talks about water a lot. Remember my comment about Wright's Falling Waters?

How Buildings Learn Part Four - Unreal Estate

Zoning, which was designed to improve city life, eventually stifles it. Zoning laws keep people, their work and the services they need, apart from each other, creating islands of specificity that resist change.

Often times zoning laws keep you from doing the very things that you want a home and property for in the first place. Zoning is also designed to separate classes. Rich from poor and high from low. It's no wonder that most folks (except planning commissions) dislike their zoning laws.

In part four of How Buildings Learn, Brand explores these limitations and how people do (or don't) get around them.